The long reach of the leader: Can empowering leadership at work result in enriched home lives?

Abstract

Work-home enrichment occurs when employees' work roles and experiences lead to benefits and resources that improve the quality of life in the home role. Guided by self-determination theory (SDT), we developed a serial mediation model in which empowering leadership predicted workhome enrichment via satisfaction of innate psychological needs of SDT and then via work engagement. Four-waves of data over a 9-month period were obtained from 289 full-time U.S. employees. Structural equation modeling and the PROCESS macro were used to verify the indirect effect of empowering leadership on work to home enrichment. Empowering leadership predicted subordinates' need satisfaction, which in turn, predicted work engagement. Work engagement was then associated with positive spillover from work to home roles in the form of work-home enrichment. Theoretically, empowering leadership is a condition of the work environment that can satisfy important psychological need requirements outlined in SDT and promote work engagement, thereby influencing employees' home functioning. Integrating the frameworks of empowering leadership and SDT, this study provided valuable insights for general employee well-being by showing how empowering leadership could have a spillover effect in the form of work-home enrichment.

Work-Sports Enrichment in Amateur Runners: A Diary Study

“…Indeed, the results of other spillover studies have shown standardized effect sizes of a comparable magnitude (e.g. Kim & Beehr, 2020;Siu et al, 2015;Siu et al, 2010). Rastogi and Chaudhary (2018) examined the relationship between job crafting and work-family enrichment through work engagement in a cross-sectional design and found standardized effect sizes between .10 and .20, which were larger than the effect sizes for the indirect effects in our study.…”

“…Researchers have indeed demonstrated that the positive state of work engagement can persist after the workday and promote functioning in other domains, contributing to work-life enrichment (e.g. Kim & Beehr, 2020;Rastogi & Chaudhary, 2018;Straub et al, 2019). Work engagement has also been linked to more specific outcomes, such as employees' willingness to invest in their relationships with their life partners in the home domain (Bakker et al, 2012) as well as life satisfaction and community involvement (Eldor et al, 2020).…”

Can Leaders Prevent Technology From Backfiring? Empowering Leadership as a Double-Edged Sword for Technostress in Care

“…This logic is supported by studies suggesting that empowering leadership reduces the influence of specific (techno)stressors on employee outcomes. For example, Windeler et al ( 2017 ) reported that empowering leaders reduce the influence of techno-complexity, while Kim and Beehr ( 2020 ) observed such leaders to mitigate negative technological spillovers from work to home. Additional empirical support underpins that leaders that build employees' resource base (Harris et al, 2015 ) and stimulate their participative decision making (Turel and Gaudioso, 2018 ) significantly reduce the influence of technostress(ors) on employee outcomes, like emotional exhaustion and job performance.…”

Empowerment and Employee Well-Being: A Mediation Analysis Study

“…In this context, an increasingly important aspect of leadership encompasses bosses' empowering leadership behaviors towards their subordinates [56,57]. Some studies suggest that empowerment, in its different manifestations, can affect employees' health and well-being [58][59][60][61].…”